Overlooked in national tech circles, Denver business leaders and entrepreneurs are quietly working together to bolster the city’s profile.

The focus isn’t to attract Fortune 500 stalwarts such as DaVita or Arrow Electronics, but to appeal to the innovators who might create the next Facebook or Google.

They’re planning events such as Denver Startup Week to showcase and connect the city’s young technology companies. They’re establishing cash and other awards to help foster their growth. They’re trying to create a community where budding and seasoned entrepreneurs would want to live and work and can easily collaborate and share ideas.

“In Boulder, there is incredible entrepreneurial density within a 12-block area,” said Bart Lorang, co-founder and chief executive of FullContact, a 2011 graduate of Boulder’s renowned TechStars startup incubator. “If I walk down the street in Boulder at night, I almost always bump into fellow CEOs or developers at other tech startups. This natural interaction is vital to the sense of community.”

FullContact, which develops software to help businesses manage contacts, relocated to Denver after completing TechStars.

“There’s no sense of community,” Lorang said of Denver. “When I walk through downtown Denver, I pass people on the street that probably work at a local tech startup. But I don’t know them. We want to change that.”

Among the initiatives:

• The Denver-based Colorado Technology Association, traditionally viewed as an organization catering to established firms, will for the first time offer free membership to startups that have yet to receive funding.

• CTA will award $25,000 to a top startup at its annual DemoGala technology conference this year.

• The Downtown Denver Partnership, in association with the CTA and others, will host Denver Startup Week in October. While similar events have been held in the city, this is the first time groups with the size and scale of the downtown partnership and CTA will be involved.

CTA president Steve Foster said the nonprofit advocacy organization, which claims 10,000 members, is “focused on enabling, retaining, growing and attracting entrepreneurs and the startup community.”

The downtown partnership wants to map where every tech-related company in downtown is based, which could address Lorang’s point about how most of the city’s tech startup workers are strangers. The partnership also wants to make Denver more bikeable and walkable and add other amenities that would help attract the future workforce, the 25- to 35-year-olds.

Why focus on this generation of workers?

The city’s workforce is expected to lose two baby boomers for every new employee it gains in the coming years, said downtown partnership president Tami Door.

“If we build the place right and create the right pro-business environment, it should open a floodgate of tech companies and other startups in Denver, and in particular, in downtown Denver,” Door said.

The effort won’t be without challenges. Denver is large and spread out compared with Boulder. While Boulder has Pearl Street, Denver has 16th Street, Lower Downtown, River North and Santa Fe, among other neighborhoods.

Denver also lacks the star power of Boulder’s Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, well-known venture capitalists entrenched in their community.

And Denver is just different culturally, in the eyes of many tech entrepreneurs, with a more button-down business feel than the sandals-and-shorts environment they’re accustomed to.

“In Boulder, part of it is everyone is very sort of laid back,” said Josh Fraser, a former TechStars student who spent four years in Boulder. “You have very natural relationships with other entrepreneurs and investors and mentors in town. Whereas in Denver, it’s more spread out. It takes more effort to do that, and the businesses tend to be older and more mature and more formal— people in suits trying to sell you stuff versus kids in jeans and T-shirts hanging out in a coffee shop building stuff together.”

Fraser moved to Silicon Valley in Califorina last year after starting Torbit, which is developing software that helps websites load faster.

Boulder lacks some key attributes — like available office space — a fact that could help Denver emerge from its shadows in the tech scene.

“Commercial space is becoming a problem,” said FullContact’s Lorang. “The morning commute coming into Boulder is a big problem, as there is no mass transit system yet. Boulder can only fit so many people, and attracting talent from places like south Denver is difficult.”

As a result, Boulder-based companies like SendGrid and Rally Software are opening offices in Denver.

There are a few neighborhoods vying to serve as the center of this new techcentric Denver. The River North district, called RiNo, shows promise, with a location not far from the city center offering startups more commercial space at far lower costs. A light-rail station is slated to open in the neighborhood in 2016. RiNo is roughly bounded by Interstate 70 to the north, Interstate 25 to the west, Park Avenue West to the south and Lawrence Street to the east.

“If there’s any contender for being the next Pearl Street area for technology, I think it’s RiNo,” said Michael Gellman, founder and chief executive of Denver-based SpireMedia. “We’re creating, in this neighborhood, a lot of what makes Boulder what it is. By having these open areas, by having these companies that are friends, by having these supportive partnerships and guys that hang and exchange ideas.”

SpireMedia, which develops Web and mobile applications, recently moved its headquarters from LoDo to RiNo. The company’s new office features built-in tools to help recruit tech talent, including two nap rooms, a pool table and a rooftop deck with a view of the mountains.

It also has enough space to allow the company to grow from 35 employees to 50 in the next year, Gellman said. The company is spending less than half what it would have paid for a similar building in LoDo.

“Denver is underrated,” said Justin Anthony, co-founder of BrightNest, a RiNo-based tech startup that serves as a digital dashboard that provides information and tools for people who want to keep their homes in shape. “We lived in (Silicon Valley), we know what that’s like. We’ve all worked and thrived in big cities. Denver has something they don’t have, and that is, a heck of a lot of untapped resources and a really good work-life balance.”

RiNo is home to dozens of creative and tech-related companies that are based in common workplace projects such as Taxi and Laundry on Lawrence. The Colorado Technology Association is planning to move its headquarters from downtown to RiNo.

“Everybody talks about how Boulder’s ecosystem is growing. I think Denver has every bit as much potential, if not more, than Boulder,” Anthony said. “The community’s coming. If we get a couple of successful startups in here and they get on the map, I think it’s going to be transformational.”

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